Taylor Sheridan’s thriller series Lioness centers on an all-female undercover CIA operation that is loosely based on a real-life U.S. Marine unit.
Lioness, which returned with its third season August 2 on Paramount+, follows Zoe Saldaña’s character Joe McNamara, a CIA operative who leads a top-secret group of female special operatives recruited from various branches of the military and tasked with infiltrating terrorist organizations by befriending their wives and daughters.
In real life, Task Force Lioness operated out of Iraq and Afghanistan to identify women who might have been used to carry out terrorist activities. The concept inspired Lioness executive producer Jill Wagner, who also acts in the show, and her husband David Lemanowicz to approach Sheridan to write a series about it.
“I feared that someone would get a hold of this idea and just create Barbies with guns or try to make the women feel too superhero-like,” Wagner told Decider. “People have to understand that there are many female heroes in the world, and they’re not necessarily in Marvel movies. They’re out there sacrificing for our country, and they have really interesting stories to tell. Because of Taylor’s voice and his mind, I knew he was the one person who could do them justice. So that’s why I went to him.”
Read on for the true story of the all-female Lioness team.
Who were the real-life Lionesses?
During the Iraq War in 2003, the American military ran into a problem as male soldiers stationed in Iraq were not allowed to search female civilians due to strict Muslim beliefs that prohibited any man from touching an unrelated woman.
Rebels quickly caught on to the issue and began to use women to smuggle weapons and explosives for terrorist attacks.
Soon, the Marine Corps and the Army formed the Lionesses to conduct more thorough surveillance on hijabi women. Team Lioness consisted of boots-on-the-ground female soldiers — often mechanics, clerks and engineers — who were deployed to combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The women accompanied male troops on patrols and house-to-house operations, conducted searches on women and children at checkpoints and established rapport with women in the community for the sake of disseminating information and identifying people who might be involved in terrorist activity.
The teams typically consisted of two to three female soldiers who joined combat and infantry units.
Eventually, the Lionesses trained local women on how to properly search other women and children so that they could take on the security responsibility after the troops left Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although women were prohibited from fighting in ground combat at the time due to the combat exclusion rule, many Team Lioness soldiers were caught up in conflicts like firefights and IED attacks that they were unequipped to handle as they were sent out to diffuse tensions between Iraqi citizens.
A 2008 PBS documentary called Lioness, directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, examined five women who were unexpectedly drawn into battle while volunteering for the unit.
“This may come as a shock to America, but we went on lots of missions,” said Shannon Morgan, a Team Lioness soldier who served in the U.S. Army’s 1st Engineer Battalion, in the documentary, according to USA Today.
“But if our government is going to allow us to play infantry, they should start training us for it. We pretty much wing it.”
What happened to the Lioness program?
Although Team Lioness was successful, the initiative was eventually phased out because of its short-term tactics. However, the program led to the Marine Corps officially establishing Female Engagement Teams in 2009, which focused more on gaining access to the community rather than being attached to combat units.
The program’s success also paved the way for policy change. In 2013, the Department of Defense lifted the combat exclusion rule, which allowed female members of the military to join combat units and further eliminated the need for a separate female team.
Although hundreds of women cycled through the all-female unit Team Lioness, the characters in Sheridan’s show — which stars Saldaña, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman — are fictionalized and not based on any specific person.
New episodes of Lioness air Sundays at 3 a.m. ET / 12 a.m. PT on Paramount+.
